This synthesis will be of interest to transit agency general managers. their special services planning staffs, as well as to any others dealing with transit agencies' provision of ADA paratransit services. It offers information from selected transit agencies about the operational practices used to provide ADA paratransit services and identifies factors perceived by transit personnel to have influenced the selection of service delivery methodology. It focuses on the state of the practice in paratransit contracting and service delivery methods to comply with ADA paratransit provisions. Administrators, practitioners, and researchers are continually faced with issues or problems on which there is much information, either in the form of reports or in terms of undocumented experience and practice. Unfortunately, this information often is scattered or not readily available in the literature, and, as a consequence, in seeking solutions, full information on what has been learned about an issue or problem is not assembled. Costly research findings may go unused, valuable experience may be overlooked, and full consideration may not be given to the available methods of solving or alleviating the issue or problem. In an effort to correct this situation, the Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Synthesis Project carried out by the Transportation Research Board as the research agency, has the objective of reporting on common transit issues and problems and synthesizing available information. The synthesis reports from this endeavour constitute a TCRP publication series in which various forms of relevant information are assembled into single, concise documents pertaining to a specific problem or closely related issues. This report of the Transportation Research Board was designed to provide insight on the range of contracting experiences to date, as well as on the range of agency assessments of efficiency and effectiveness of contract arrangements and of the factors influencing methodology selection. To develop this synthesis in a comprehensive manner and to ensure inclusion of significant knowledge, available information was assembled from numerous sources, including a number of public transportation agencies. A topic panel of experts in the subject area was established to guide the researchers in organizing and evaluating the collected data, and to review the final synthesis report. (A)
Abstract